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21.8.12

Day 2

The weather is mucho mucho calor, but the house and the beer is fresca and I am trying to plunge deep into my uncomfortable zone and speak spanish with the vocabulary of a 2 year old. Luckily I haven't needed to use my words yet, and those around me are kind and helpful as I butcher their language.

I'm really excited to learn and am hoping to have a decent grasp on it once the year is over.

Two days have been spent in Alejandra's beautiful studio, she took the photo above. It is really a lovely place full of bright colors, large mirrors, and lovely images. The tile floor feels cool against my bare feet and there is something magical in the rush and slide of my feet against hard stone as I turn.

The collection of ladies here is small but their interest is keen and they are very serious dancers. We started the basics yesterday and are building from there. They are so self conscious about themselves and the movements, and me staring at them, and Alejandra staring at them...but they are beginning to feel it, starting to dance together. It's such a magical thing to watch a student connect the dots, and oh!

I watched the Simpsons in spanish today and Alejandra's husband Carlos helped me with my pronunciation and some spanish questions. I think I should spend all my time learning spanish via the Simpsons....

Tomorrow I am being taken out to run around Mexicali proper during the day and Alejandra's mom is cooking us a traditional Mexican meal. It seems like Mexicali is more like America in the fact that the cultures are so mixed that they don't seem to have much of their own culture to share! There was a long discussion by the ladies in class tonight where I should be taken and shown tomorrow and where I should be feed at. The suspense is killing me but I'll keep you all informed.

I'm going to go watch Braveheart in Spanish now with the family, oh and oddly enough Mexicali is known for its Chinese food, what a wild world we live in

2 comments:

I'm so happy and excited for you to be on this journey. While I long for the road and the unknown of travel, I have many reasons to be a home (mainly my furball a Shepard Husky named Landon). You're journey is going to be an amazing one and I look forward to reading about it and crossing paths with you along the way! :)

Meditations

"You can't stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes"

~Winnie the Pooh

"Such objects made up the daily luggage of this eternal traveler, rootless soul who made his home in dance studios, rehearsal rooms, and on stages around the world."

“It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days, such a humorless little prig. Lightly, lightly – it’s the best advice ever given me. When it comes to dying even. Nothing ponderous, or portentous, or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or Little Nell. And of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear light. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you, sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self-pity and despair. That’s why you must walk so lightly. Lightly my darling, on tiptoes and no luggage, not even a sponge bag, completely unencumbered.”

— Aldous Huxley, "Island"

"A true journey is much more than a vivid or vacant interval of being away. The best travel was not a simple train trip or even a whole collection of them, but something lengthier and more complex: an experience of the fourth dimension, with stops and starts and longueurs, spells of illness and recovery, hurrying then having to wait, with the sudden phenomenon of happiness as an episodic reward."

– Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

– Louise Erdrich

"A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving."

~Lao Tzu

“We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.”~Anais Nin

"When you are on stage you are having an affair with three thousand people." -Gelsey Kirkland

"For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse it's full length. and there I travel, looking, looking breathlessly."

~Don Juan

"It does not matter how slow you go so long as you do not stop."—Wisdom of Confucius